Don’t know if you remember me, but it’s Marie. You helped me with my beautiful baby girl Beaner. I had been wanting to let you know about this, but I know you have your own stuff you are going through and well I didn’t know how to say it… But I just wanted to let you know that my baby girl Mia passed away On Oct 27, 2008 due to SIDS. She was 13 1/2 weeks old and getting so big! Its so hard to believe that its going on 3 months that she’s been gone. I would tell myself, “tell Catherine next week” but next week turned into well this long…. Thanks for all you did for us when I needed people there for me… I just thought you would want to know….Always,Marie

I never met Beaner. I never held her hand or touched her cheek. I knew her only through a story that her mother told me, pictures that she sent me, the fragments of a life that she shared and that became, somehow, strangely, briefly, intertwined with my own.

You can read her story here, and here. It’s a beautiful story, the story of a child who was so loved that her mother fought back all of her fear to keep her, for better or for worse, for the sake of a life that she wanted to nurture as her own, on her own terms. Her mother reached out to me, and to you, to all of you, for support and guidance and she drew some of her strength from that and she made the bold step of clasping Beaner to her heart and deciding to never let go and that, that was amazing. Deciding to never let go can be a difficult choice – for some, the wrong choice, an impossible choice – but she made it and she was happy and she kept her Beaner and Beaner was loved.

And now Beaner is gone, and I don’t know, I just don’t know what to say, because this was the story that was supposed to have the happy ending and although I tell myself that Marie had her Beaner for all the time that Beaner had on this earth, and that that is wonderful, that that is a gift, it remains that to have such a precious gift and then to have it snatched away is tragic beyond measure. So I don’t what to say. And it is not, in any case, my place to say. It is not my right, to sing an elegy for Beaner, to wring philosophy from her death. Not my right at all.

I didn’t know Beaner – little Mia Catherine – but she found her way into a corner of my heart, and there she remains, this child I did not know and will never know but do love, a little, from a distance, from – now – a tragic distance, nonetheless. There she remains, and there she is mourned, and there she will be remembered.

Rest in peace, Mia Catherine. You touched more hearts than you could know.

You can leave condolences to Maria in the comments. She’ll be reading, and I know that the support will mean so much to her.

Then – as I insisted last week, not knowing how soon I would be confronted by the demands of my own words – hug your children. And your moms. And anyone whose heart touches yours. And be grateful.